The last chapter of Decision is up! It's even longer than normal, mostly because I was too lazy to separate it into two chapters. The next story is still in the planning stage, but it should be coming along in a week or so. I hope everyone doesn't get tired of this series, because I still have a lot of plot rolling around in my head... Ack! Enough talking already, read! Thanks for the reviews, and I would love to have any reviews, ideas, problems and so forth. -krtshadow
Chapter 6: Swingin'
I have to admit that being out here, with approval this time, is an absolute rush. I feel like I'm free again, and that while all my problems aren't gone, they are at least left behind for a while. Dick had treated me to an... interesting trip into Gotham. It was faintly reminiscent of an especially deadly roller coaster ride, actually. I had to groan at the thought. How the heck would I know, it's been years since I've been on a roller coaster. And then we traded the car for the hiss and crunch of a fired grapple, and the whistling sound as you move though the air. In a way that was roller coaster all of its own. Land, look, aim, fire, pull, jump, fall, swing, and land. The rhythm came back to me slowly, but surely.
Dick was holding back big time, and doing his best to make it so I wouldn't notice, but I'm not stupid. I'm out of practice with this particular method of travel, and even when I was in practice he was twice as good as I was. Yet another thing that was just going to take some time. Well, for once, I actually had time. Dick landed on the roof of Gotham Central Bank, and I landed beside him and rolled, coming to my feet near the edge of the ten-story building. I watched the traffic below, the lights mesmerizing as they moved. "Dang, it's good to be back."
Dick joined me. "Glad you think so. We missed you, y'know."
"I'd wondered." Dick looked like he wanted to say something, so I fired a grapple and resumed patrolling again. Not like that would stop him or anything. Somehow he managed to catch up with me and we landed on the next roof in perfect synchronization.
"Didn't trust us very much, did you?" Dick sounded annoyed at my previous statement. He obviously thought that I had said it out of spite or something. I hadn't, I had just spoken before I'd thought. Now, it looked like I was going to have to have this discussion, whether I wanted to or not.
I turned to face him, seeing that he wasn't really angry with me, just almost hurt. "Dick, don't take this wrong, ok? I didn't mean what I said as anything other than a comment, but try to look at this from my perspective. Yeah, I trusted you. I waited. Three months I waited, and then I started to doubt, yeah."
Dick winced. I hated to talk to him like this, knowing that it was all my father's fault, not his or Bruce's, but maybe if we both got some stuff off of our chests it would get our relationship back on the road back to where it had been. I understood why the clan had made the decision that they had about contracting me, but they needed to understand where I was coming from. What Bruce had decided was possibly for the best, but that was looking at things with hindsight, and I hadn't had that advantage when I sat alone in Switzerland.
Dick looked out over the skyline and sighed. "I'm sorry. Bruce and I had a couple of huge fights over this. I don't know if you'll like this or not, but I thought we should screw what your dad said and bring you home anyway. Bruce wouldn't even consider it, or didn't seem to anyway. Your relationship with your dad is very important to him, nonexistent as it may be."
That was understandable. Bruce hadn't had a father since he was six, of course he would be sensitive about anything that would cause someone to lose or at least be separated from a parent. I knew that the decision that he'd made wasn't an easy one. To be honest, every time I gave it serious thought, I came up with the same answer that he had. I couldn't be angry at him, because I would have done the exact same thing in his place. Nor could I think that Dick was totally wrong, because a big part of me wished that the clan would have just picked me up one day and taken me home. I sighed softly. "Yeah. I'm really not mad at any of you now, but I was for a long time." What is done is done, and I don't know if changing it would have been good anyway. I would have likely been a different person, but better? I'd never know.
I shook off my thoughtfulness as the faint sound of a scream hit my ears. Dick and I moved as one, at least for the first jump, and then he was ahead of me. Even as most of my concentration was on finding the source of the scream as quick as possible, a small part of my brain watched Dick's moves with awe. Yeah, I could probably take him on a mat nine times out of ten, but if it ever came down to a chase, or a fight where he could fully utilize his acrobatics, the odds would be even, if not reversed totally. He just moved where I had to think to move, and the effortless flow of his actions never paused, not even before doing stunts that someone with the power of flight would be hard pressed to imitate. Yeah, practice will help me a lot, and give me a couple of weeks and I'll be better at this than when I was Robin, but there was no way in heck that I'd ever to keep up with Dick if he didn't want me too. So that was why I landed on the roof next to an alley a good fifteen seconds behind Dick, even though it was only about three blocks away.
I was slightly surprised that he hadn't already jumped the gang of guys who were slowly pursuing a middle-aged lady who had her back up against the wall. There were five of them, and they were laughing it up, sporting knives and telling her in great detail exactly what they planned to do to her before they killed her. I shot Dick a questioning look and he answered with a raised eyebrow of his own and the words, "Nothing's happened yet. You take 'em."
My eyes narrowed slightly as I took a split second to scan the area and plan what I was going to do. Dick obviously wanted to see me in action, and who was I to deny such scum the beating they deserved? Knowing that Dick would likely report the entire incident to Bruce didn't bother me at all. Hmm, I guess my self-confidence really has grown considerably. Good, it was about time.
It was also time to deal with the situation unfolding below. The lady let out another rather forlorn scream, and the laughter of the scumbags at her terror covered any sound that might have possibly warned them. I dropped over the side of the roof, slowing my fall by bouncing off of the sides of the alley and by grabbing a fire escape, and landed in a crouch between the lady and the gang. My voice was cold as I gave them a chance they didn't deserve. "You have three seconds to run. One." They seemed stunned by my sudden entrance and stared at me in shock. "Two."
"GET HIM." Idiots.
I dove into the center of the rough circle they were standing in. One swung a switchblade at me and I ducked and rolled, kicking his legs out from underneath him and applying a carefully gauged kick to the temple. Didn't want to kill him, after all. One down. Two more came at me, swinging their fists with reckless abandon. I overruled my initial temptation, which was to let them knock each other out, and somersaulted over their heads, landing on my hands and using that force to drive a foot into the back of each of their heads. Three down. The next one had a baseball bat, and I avoided his attempted home run of my head by flipping backwards. As he prepared to swing again, I grabbed the bat and wrenched it from his hands, reversing it and tapping the last guy, who was trying to sneak up behind me, on the head. Hard. Four down, and a quick spin kick made five. I gave each guy a careful look, just in case anybody was faking, and then mentally congratulated myself. Not bad. Five in a minute. I could do better, but not by much.
But there were other things to think about now. I moved closer the woman, who was watching me with wide-open eyes. She blinked suddenly, and I got the feeling that she hadn't dared to since I'd appeared. I stopped a good five feet away from her, well outside of her personal space. I knew that an experience like she'd had could traumatize, and being approached by a person dressed in black , wearing a mask, and who could obviously easily hurt her, would not help at all. "Excuse me, ma'am. Are you ok?"
She took a big breath and nodded her head slowly. "Yes. Thank you, I... thank you." She was quickly regaining her poise, taking a second to pick up her purse from where it had fallen and straightening her shirt.
"Do you want me to walk you home?"
"No, I'm just around the corner, I'll be fine." She gave me a rather weak smile, but it was enough to tell me that she probably would be fine.
"Ok, but I'll keep an eye on you until you get there. Are you willing to press charges?" I motioned at the thugs draped in an assortment of unconscious poses across the alley.
She nodded. "I'll call the police as soon as I get home."
"They'll be here." I escorted her to the mouth of the alley and waited in the shadows as she shakily made her way down the street to her apartment building. As soon as she entered, I turned back to the men on the ground, only to find Dick already in the process of securing their hands. I moved towards the closest and bound his hands behind his back with a thick piece of bendable wire. After they were all leaned nicely up against the alley wall, we took to the roofs again.
Dick grinned at me. "Good job. You handled that real well."
"Thanks. Do we need to wait 'til the police get here?"
"Nope, someone will probably be here in less than twenty minutes, and I'd bet ten bucks that none of those..." he motioned down to the alley floor "... will be moving for an hour at least." He grinned at me as I smirked and dusted my hands together. "Well, we'd better get back to work." With that, he fired a grapple, and once again, I had to really work just to keep up.
We crouched for a breather at the top of one of the gargoyles that are scattered among the many buildings of Gotham. Neither of us really needed the rest, but the night was relatively slow, and there was nothing else to do at the moment. Dick looked at me thoughtfully. "So, you need a name, huh?"
I wrinkled my nose under my mask. "Yeah, any suggestions?"
He chuckled under his breath. "At least you're smart enough to ask for suggestions. I thought about it for weeks, and finally just moped until Supes told me off." It hadn't been exactly like that, I knew the story, but it was just his way of showing that he was pleased that I asked him for his opinion.
"So, anything come to mind?" I thought again, but drew nothing but a blank.
"Ummm, let's see, we gotta start somewhere... While you were gone, what name did you go under?"
"Mostly Tim Drake." Not very helpful, but it was the truth, except for... hmmm.
"No nicknames, names your teachers called you, anything?"
"Actually, I may have just thought of something. The teacher I studied under first, and the one that I was with for the longest, he knew who I was."
Dick's eyebrows raised almost to his hairline. "Knew as in knew about you as Robin knew?" I... think I followed that.
"Yeah, he could read body language and he had this photographic memory like you can't believe. He could recognize people by just seeing the way that they walked. It was amazing. He didn't think I was worth much to start with..."
"Or he just made you feel that way. It's a tried and true teaching method. Just ask Bruce." Oh, the sarcasm.
"Yeah. Anyway, he made a big point about how a robin was a rather weak bird."
"Hey!" Dick gave me an offended look.
"I'm just saying what he said! He got onto this kick of calling me by bird names. I don't think he ever called me by my real name. We went through about every bird in the world." It sure had seemed that way at the time, anyway.
"Like?"
"Like after I finally graduated past Robin, I was Jay, then Gull, Buzzard..."
"BUZZARD?" Dick exploded into laughter.
I hit him on top of the head. "HEY! Shut up! Not funny!" He finally quieted down and I continued, "Anyway, back to what I was saying." I paused to glare at Dick, who had started chuckling again. Smart guy that he is, he ignored my death glare totally and waved me to on with the story. "He kinda worked his way up."
Dick began to look intrigued. "So, what was the final analysis? Eagle? Condor?" He smirked. "Vulture?"
"Funny. It was Hawk. I don't know if that would have been the final one or not, he... he died." I winced, remembering.
Dick winced right along with me. "Ooh. How?"
"Old age, I guess. He knew it was coming, and it was peaceful, but..." I shook my head. "...I was there when he died." I turned my head away slightly. His death had affected me deeply. He hadn't been exactly a father figure or anything, just a teacher, but he'd been about all that I'd had at the time. His death had really screwed up my training as well, but that was another story altogether. I shook my head slightly. "He didn't call me Hawk until that last day. Huh, I haven't thought about that for months."
Dick laid a hand on my shoulder. "Hawk, huh? I like it. I like it a lot. But, there's a problem..."
"What?" I was mentally trying out the name. It was definitely better than anything else I'd thought up so far.
"It doesn't have two syllables." Huh? What the heck does that have to do with anything? Dick gave a serious look. "Has to have two syllables. Batman, Nightwing, Superman, Batgirl, all the cool people have two syllables."
It took me a second to figure out that he was trying to get my mind off of the topic of death. I appreciated the effort, and chuckled. "If you suggest Hawk-man, I will kill you."
"Nah, it's been done. But I think you should keep the hawk part, it suits you. Swooping down and kicking tail and all that. But isn't a hawk a day kind of bird? H'bout Nighthawk, no, that's too close to mine. Hmm, got it!"
"I got one, too. What do you think of Darkhawk?"
"Aww, man, that's what I was going to say!" Nightwing laughed.
"Oh come on, was not. You just like mine better than yours, so you'll try to take credit for my idea."
"You know me all too well. Darkhawk. I like it. I think you just got named, bro."
"Yeah." I was about to suggest that we return to patrolling, when I felt something touch my shoulder. I moved fast, whirling to face whatever danger was approaching my back.
I found myself face to face with Batgirl. I relaxed from my defensive position with a sigh. "Wing, you idiot, you just sat there and watched her sneak up on me, didn't you?" His laughter was an adequate answer.
Cass gave us a shake of her head, and pointed out towards the lights of Gotham. "Nightwing and..." she paused for a second, turning her head towards me, "Darkhawk talk too much. Get to patrol. My turn to sit and watch lights."
"Yes, ma'am!" Nightwing laughed as he threw himself off the pinnacle backwards, not even bothering with a grapple.
I took one look at how he did it and decided I'd take a slightly more controlled way down. "See you tomorrow, Cass?"
She sat on the very tip of the ledge and tipped her head back to look at me. "Yes. Bye."
And I threw myself back into the nightlife of Gotham.
End.
Series to be continued.
Chapter 6: Swingin'
I have to admit that being out here, with approval this time, is an absolute rush. I feel like I'm free again, and that while all my problems aren't gone, they are at least left behind for a while. Dick had treated me to an... interesting trip into Gotham. It was faintly reminiscent of an especially deadly roller coaster ride, actually. I had to groan at the thought. How the heck would I know, it's been years since I've been on a roller coaster. And then we traded the car for the hiss and crunch of a fired grapple, and the whistling sound as you move though the air. In a way that was roller coaster all of its own. Land, look, aim, fire, pull, jump, fall, swing, and land. The rhythm came back to me slowly, but surely.
Dick was holding back big time, and doing his best to make it so I wouldn't notice, but I'm not stupid. I'm out of practice with this particular method of travel, and even when I was in practice he was twice as good as I was. Yet another thing that was just going to take some time. Well, for once, I actually had time. Dick landed on the roof of Gotham Central Bank, and I landed beside him and rolled, coming to my feet near the edge of the ten-story building. I watched the traffic below, the lights mesmerizing as they moved. "Dang, it's good to be back."
Dick joined me. "Glad you think so. We missed you, y'know."
"I'd wondered." Dick looked like he wanted to say something, so I fired a grapple and resumed patrolling again. Not like that would stop him or anything. Somehow he managed to catch up with me and we landed on the next roof in perfect synchronization.
"Didn't trust us very much, did you?" Dick sounded annoyed at my previous statement. He obviously thought that I had said it out of spite or something. I hadn't, I had just spoken before I'd thought. Now, it looked like I was going to have to have this discussion, whether I wanted to or not.
I turned to face him, seeing that he wasn't really angry with me, just almost hurt. "Dick, don't take this wrong, ok? I didn't mean what I said as anything other than a comment, but try to look at this from my perspective. Yeah, I trusted you. I waited. Three months I waited, and then I started to doubt, yeah."
Dick winced. I hated to talk to him like this, knowing that it was all my father's fault, not his or Bruce's, but maybe if we both got some stuff off of our chests it would get our relationship back on the road back to where it had been. I understood why the clan had made the decision that they had about contracting me, but they needed to understand where I was coming from. What Bruce had decided was possibly for the best, but that was looking at things with hindsight, and I hadn't had that advantage when I sat alone in Switzerland.
Dick looked out over the skyline and sighed. "I'm sorry. Bruce and I had a couple of huge fights over this. I don't know if you'll like this or not, but I thought we should screw what your dad said and bring you home anyway. Bruce wouldn't even consider it, or didn't seem to anyway. Your relationship with your dad is very important to him, nonexistent as it may be."
That was understandable. Bruce hadn't had a father since he was six, of course he would be sensitive about anything that would cause someone to lose or at least be separated from a parent. I knew that the decision that he'd made wasn't an easy one. To be honest, every time I gave it serious thought, I came up with the same answer that he had. I couldn't be angry at him, because I would have done the exact same thing in his place. Nor could I think that Dick was totally wrong, because a big part of me wished that the clan would have just picked me up one day and taken me home. I sighed softly. "Yeah. I'm really not mad at any of you now, but I was for a long time." What is done is done, and I don't know if changing it would have been good anyway. I would have likely been a different person, but better? I'd never know.
I shook off my thoughtfulness as the faint sound of a scream hit my ears. Dick and I moved as one, at least for the first jump, and then he was ahead of me. Even as most of my concentration was on finding the source of the scream as quick as possible, a small part of my brain watched Dick's moves with awe. Yeah, I could probably take him on a mat nine times out of ten, but if it ever came down to a chase, or a fight where he could fully utilize his acrobatics, the odds would be even, if not reversed totally. He just moved where I had to think to move, and the effortless flow of his actions never paused, not even before doing stunts that someone with the power of flight would be hard pressed to imitate. Yeah, practice will help me a lot, and give me a couple of weeks and I'll be better at this than when I was Robin, but there was no way in heck that I'd ever to keep up with Dick if he didn't want me too. So that was why I landed on the roof next to an alley a good fifteen seconds behind Dick, even though it was only about three blocks away.
I was slightly surprised that he hadn't already jumped the gang of guys who were slowly pursuing a middle-aged lady who had her back up against the wall. There were five of them, and they were laughing it up, sporting knives and telling her in great detail exactly what they planned to do to her before they killed her. I shot Dick a questioning look and he answered with a raised eyebrow of his own and the words, "Nothing's happened yet. You take 'em."
My eyes narrowed slightly as I took a split second to scan the area and plan what I was going to do. Dick obviously wanted to see me in action, and who was I to deny such scum the beating they deserved? Knowing that Dick would likely report the entire incident to Bruce didn't bother me at all. Hmm, I guess my self-confidence really has grown considerably. Good, it was about time.
It was also time to deal with the situation unfolding below. The lady let out another rather forlorn scream, and the laughter of the scumbags at her terror covered any sound that might have possibly warned them. I dropped over the side of the roof, slowing my fall by bouncing off of the sides of the alley and by grabbing a fire escape, and landed in a crouch between the lady and the gang. My voice was cold as I gave them a chance they didn't deserve. "You have three seconds to run. One." They seemed stunned by my sudden entrance and stared at me in shock. "Two."
"GET HIM." Idiots.
I dove into the center of the rough circle they were standing in. One swung a switchblade at me and I ducked and rolled, kicking his legs out from underneath him and applying a carefully gauged kick to the temple. Didn't want to kill him, after all. One down. Two more came at me, swinging their fists with reckless abandon. I overruled my initial temptation, which was to let them knock each other out, and somersaulted over their heads, landing on my hands and using that force to drive a foot into the back of each of their heads. Three down. The next one had a baseball bat, and I avoided his attempted home run of my head by flipping backwards. As he prepared to swing again, I grabbed the bat and wrenched it from his hands, reversing it and tapping the last guy, who was trying to sneak up behind me, on the head. Hard. Four down, and a quick spin kick made five. I gave each guy a careful look, just in case anybody was faking, and then mentally congratulated myself. Not bad. Five in a minute. I could do better, but not by much.
But there were other things to think about now. I moved closer the woman, who was watching me with wide-open eyes. She blinked suddenly, and I got the feeling that she hadn't dared to since I'd appeared. I stopped a good five feet away from her, well outside of her personal space. I knew that an experience like she'd had could traumatize, and being approached by a person dressed in black , wearing a mask, and who could obviously easily hurt her, would not help at all. "Excuse me, ma'am. Are you ok?"
She took a big breath and nodded her head slowly. "Yes. Thank you, I... thank you." She was quickly regaining her poise, taking a second to pick up her purse from where it had fallen and straightening her shirt.
"Do you want me to walk you home?"
"No, I'm just around the corner, I'll be fine." She gave me a rather weak smile, but it was enough to tell me that she probably would be fine.
"Ok, but I'll keep an eye on you until you get there. Are you willing to press charges?" I motioned at the thugs draped in an assortment of unconscious poses across the alley.
She nodded. "I'll call the police as soon as I get home."
"They'll be here." I escorted her to the mouth of the alley and waited in the shadows as she shakily made her way down the street to her apartment building. As soon as she entered, I turned back to the men on the ground, only to find Dick already in the process of securing their hands. I moved towards the closest and bound his hands behind his back with a thick piece of bendable wire. After they were all leaned nicely up against the alley wall, we took to the roofs again.
Dick grinned at me. "Good job. You handled that real well."
"Thanks. Do we need to wait 'til the police get here?"
"Nope, someone will probably be here in less than twenty minutes, and I'd bet ten bucks that none of those..." he motioned down to the alley floor "... will be moving for an hour at least." He grinned at me as I smirked and dusted my hands together. "Well, we'd better get back to work." With that, he fired a grapple, and once again, I had to really work just to keep up.
We crouched for a breather at the top of one of the gargoyles that are scattered among the many buildings of Gotham. Neither of us really needed the rest, but the night was relatively slow, and there was nothing else to do at the moment. Dick looked at me thoughtfully. "So, you need a name, huh?"
I wrinkled my nose under my mask. "Yeah, any suggestions?"
He chuckled under his breath. "At least you're smart enough to ask for suggestions. I thought about it for weeks, and finally just moped until Supes told me off." It hadn't been exactly like that, I knew the story, but it was just his way of showing that he was pleased that I asked him for his opinion.
"So, anything come to mind?" I thought again, but drew nothing but a blank.
"Ummm, let's see, we gotta start somewhere... While you were gone, what name did you go under?"
"Mostly Tim Drake." Not very helpful, but it was the truth, except for... hmmm.
"No nicknames, names your teachers called you, anything?"
"Actually, I may have just thought of something. The teacher I studied under first, and the one that I was with for the longest, he knew who I was."
Dick's eyebrows raised almost to his hairline. "Knew as in knew about you as Robin knew?" I... think I followed that.
"Yeah, he could read body language and he had this photographic memory like you can't believe. He could recognize people by just seeing the way that they walked. It was amazing. He didn't think I was worth much to start with..."
"Or he just made you feel that way. It's a tried and true teaching method. Just ask Bruce." Oh, the sarcasm.
"Yeah. Anyway, he made a big point about how a robin was a rather weak bird."
"Hey!" Dick gave me an offended look.
"I'm just saying what he said! He got onto this kick of calling me by bird names. I don't think he ever called me by my real name. We went through about every bird in the world." It sure had seemed that way at the time, anyway.
"Like?"
"Like after I finally graduated past Robin, I was Jay, then Gull, Buzzard..."
"BUZZARD?" Dick exploded into laughter.
I hit him on top of the head. "HEY! Shut up! Not funny!" He finally quieted down and I continued, "Anyway, back to what I was saying." I paused to glare at Dick, who had started chuckling again. Smart guy that he is, he ignored my death glare totally and waved me to on with the story. "He kinda worked his way up."
Dick began to look intrigued. "So, what was the final analysis? Eagle? Condor?" He smirked. "Vulture?"
"Funny. It was Hawk. I don't know if that would have been the final one or not, he... he died." I winced, remembering.
Dick winced right along with me. "Ooh. How?"
"Old age, I guess. He knew it was coming, and it was peaceful, but..." I shook my head. "...I was there when he died." I turned my head away slightly. His death had affected me deeply. He hadn't been exactly a father figure or anything, just a teacher, but he'd been about all that I'd had at the time. His death had really screwed up my training as well, but that was another story altogether. I shook my head slightly. "He didn't call me Hawk until that last day. Huh, I haven't thought about that for months."
Dick laid a hand on my shoulder. "Hawk, huh? I like it. I like it a lot. But, there's a problem..."
"What?" I was mentally trying out the name. It was definitely better than anything else I'd thought up so far.
"It doesn't have two syllables." Huh? What the heck does that have to do with anything? Dick gave a serious look. "Has to have two syllables. Batman, Nightwing, Superman, Batgirl, all the cool people have two syllables."
It took me a second to figure out that he was trying to get my mind off of the topic of death. I appreciated the effort, and chuckled. "If you suggest Hawk-man, I will kill you."
"Nah, it's been done. But I think you should keep the hawk part, it suits you. Swooping down and kicking tail and all that. But isn't a hawk a day kind of bird? H'bout Nighthawk, no, that's too close to mine. Hmm, got it!"
"I got one, too. What do you think of Darkhawk?"
"Aww, man, that's what I was going to say!" Nightwing laughed.
"Oh come on, was not. You just like mine better than yours, so you'll try to take credit for my idea."
"You know me all too well. Darkhawk. I like it. I think you just got named, bro."
"Yeah." I was about to suggest that we return to patrolling, when I felt something touch my shoulder. I moved fast, whirling to face whatever danger was approaching my back.
I found myself face to face with Batgirl. I relaxed from my defensive position with a sigh. "Wing, you idiot, you just sat there and watched her sneak up on me, didn't you?" His laughter was an adequate answer.
Cass gave us a shake of her head, and pointed out towards the lights of Gotham. "Nightwing and..." she paused for a second, turning her head towards me, "Darkhawk talk too much. Get to patrol. My turn to sit and watch lights."
"Yes, ma'am!" Nightwing laughed as he threw himself off the pinnacle backwards, not even bothering with a grapple.
I took one look at how he did it and decided I'd take a slightly more controlled way down. "See you tomorrow, Cass?"
She sat on the very tip of the ledge and tipped her head back to look at me. "Yes. Bye."
And I threw myself back into the nightlife of Gotham.
End.
Series to be continued.